Why (and How) We Use Creative Commons for Our Stories

This piece was commissioned by Nieman Lab for the tenth anniversary of Creative Commons, and was published initially by them.

Happy birthday, Creative Commons.

ProPublica
has made important use of Creative Commons since our launch four and a half
years ago. While we make a few exceptions at the request of publishing
partners, our preference (and our general practice) is to make all of our
stories available for republication under a Creative Commons license (in our
case, the “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs” version), with some extra requirements specific to our
needs. The terms are described on a page headed “Steal Our Stories,” which is, in turn, linked to
from every page on our site. Moreover, every story has a “republish” button,
which makes republishing our stories and complying with the license easy:
Pushing that button reveals a box containing an easy to copy-and-paste version
of the story using only common html tags, without multimedia or other elements
that often make republishing difficult in content management systems. The code
also contains our special tracking tag (more on that later).

In the last year, republication of ProPublica stories
under our CC license has increased dramatically. Through November, we’ve recorded
more than 4.2 million page views this year for authorized reprints of our work,
which is up 77 percent over the same period in 2011, and is the equivalent of
an additional 29 percent on top of the traffic to our own web site.

Among the literally thousands of sites that have reprinted
ProPublica stories in 2012 alone are Ars Technica, the Atlantic Wire, CBS News, the Charlotte
Observer, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Cleveland Plain Dealer,
Foreign Policy, the Houston Chronicle, the Huffington Post, the Las Vegas Sun, the
Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, MinnPost, Minnesota
Public Radio, Mother Jones, MSNBC, Nature, NBCNews.com, the Newark Star-Ledger,
the New Haven Register, the New York Daily News, Nieman Journalism Lab, the San Jose Mercury News, Scientific
American, the Seattle Times, Slate, Talking Points Memo, the Tampa Bay Times, the
Trentonian, USA Today, the Utne
Reader, Wired and Yahoo News.

Why do we do this? ProPublica’s
mission is for our journalism to have impact, that is
for it to spur reform. Greater reach — the widest possible audience — doesn’t
equate to impact, but it can help, and certainly doesn’t hurt. So we encourage
it. And, of course, we started in 2008 with almost no audience or reputation at
all, and needed — and still need — to increase the circle of people who know
us, and our work. CC helps us achieve that goal.

There are a few catches, though. Our stories are (we hope)
carefully crafted, and often a bit tricky — controversial, frequently somewhat
damning. So we insist that they be reprinted in full, essentially without
editing. The “NoDerivs” part of the CC license makes
that requirement very straightforward. And we are interested in readers coming
back to our website to read related stories and see related multimedia, so NoDerivs helps us require that internal links in a story be
maintained. In addition, while we’re a non-profit, we see no reason why others
should be able to sell our work without sharing the proceeds with us, so we
prohibit commercial use of our stories via the “NonCommercial”
license. We define “non-commercial” to mean that the stories themselves may not
be sold, nor may advertising be sold specifically against them. We try not to
be commercially naïve, and we’re hardly anti-capitalist, so we’re fine with ads
appearing on pages along with reprints of our stories, and we are happy to have
our stories appear behind paywalls or count against
pay-meter thresholds.

One other thing: we do want to keep track of all this
activity, so that we can understand how our material is being used, and can
report to you and others (including funders and our own Board) what’s being
republished where, and roughly the size of the audience for the republished
stories, just as we did above. So we created a simple JavaScript beacon that we
call Pixel Ping. We designed it, working with developers
at DocumentCloud, to be as lightweight as possible
and so that it doesn’t violate, either in spirit or letter, the privacy
policies of the sites that republish our work. Pixel Ping simply counts the
number of times our stories are read on sites that republish them. It doesn’t
collect any information about visitors, and it neither sets nor reads browser
cookies. It’s open source, too.

These extra requirements, set out on our Steal Our Stories
page, effectively constitute our own glosses on the CC license we employ.

Creative Commons solves a particular problem for us — how
to encourage republication at scale without tying up staff in negotiating deals
and policing unauthorized uses. We’ve found it an invaluable aid in building
our publishing platform, in reaching additional readers, and in maximizing the
chance that the journalism we publish will have important impact.